As part of the infamous Bromley Contingent of Sex Pistols followers, Banshees Siouxsie Sioux (vocals) and Steven Severin (bass) had to watch from close quarters as most of their punk friends formed bands who were quickly signed to record companies. There was no such joy for the Banshees, however, despite them being one of the first wave of punk groups and recording two highly acclaimed sessions for the BBC’s John Peel programme. By early 1978, articles routinely referred to them as “Britain’s best unsigned band” and a campaign to elevate their status even led to the words “sign the Banshees” being sprayed across record company buildings. Polydor Records eventually took the plunge, but you can understand the labels’ reticence. Siouxsie was a controversial figure, prone to wearing a swastika armband to outrage and being involved in the notorious Bill Grundy incident on TV, which led to the veteran presenter’s sacking, the Pistols’ being branded “filth” and Sioux a “punk shocker” on tabloid front pages. However, most of the uncertainty was commercial: just how far could a label go with a band who sounded like nothing else before them, had a voice as coldly foreboding as a ghostly sea siren and whose music sounded like glass shattering? To the top, of course, and this single started the ascent. No 7 in August 1978, Hong Kong Garden took what would become known as post-punk into the mainstream. The intro played on xylophone, John McKay’s oriental hookline and Siouxsie’s ice-queen cries still sound radical and exhilarating today. In 1978, it perhaps wasn’t immediately obvious that the song’s heady imagery (“Harmful elements in the air, symbols clashing everywhere…”) was inspired by an incident involving racist skinheads at Siouxsie’s childhood local Chinese takeaway, the Hong Kong Garden in Chislehurst, Kent.

Released to rave reviews, the Banshees’ 1978 debut, The Scream, remains one of the stone tablets of post-punk. Journalist Paul Morley – frothing about the album’s inversion of musical cliches, dark colours and naked moods – declared it “unlike anything in rock”, and its influence is still audibly present in the work of current bands such as Florence and the Machine, and Savages. The Scream is packed with killer tracks – Pure, Jigsaw Feeling, Mirage and the rest – but Switch, the closing track, sums up just how far the band had travelled from punk in such a relatively short time. Here, stark anguish gives way to bleak melancholy, driving saxophone and pounding Glitter drums, as Siouxsie ponders the problems that occur when personalities collide, words which would soon appear eerily prophetic.

Punters at the Banshees’ concert at the Capitol theatre, Aberdeen on the evening of 7 September 1979 were met with an astonishing announcement from the singer. “Two art-school students fucked off out of it,” she began. “You have my blessings to beat the shit out of them.” Siouxsie’s fury and a plethora of “Banshees quit” stories were triggered after guitarist and key figure John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris exited the band in the middle of a tour, grumbling about how the band’s “original ideals” had given way to the usual album-tour schedule. It was true that the group’s second album had been rushed, a fact underlined by the inclusion of the sprawling, 14-minute Lord’s Prayer, which dated back to their first gig three years previously, with Sid Vicious on drums. From the mournful red poppies on the cover to the songs’ atmosphere of claustrophobic menace, Join Hands is a very bleak album, but by no stretch of the imagination a bad one. Track four – Icon – is as wintry as any of them, but the combination of apocalyptic imagery (“icons falling from the spires”) and chorus that hints at catchier pop to come is as fine a place as any to bid a fond farewell to Banshees Mk 1.

4 Happy House

The Banshees’ Top 10 third album, Kaleidoscope, rings the changes. With Slits drummer Budgie giving the band a new rhythmic groove and Magazine guitarist John McGeoch providing greater musicality, the Banshees tore up their plans and reinvented themselves. In came pianos, drum machines and reggae polyrhythms, as they began a gradual shift to twisted pop. The album’s first single in April 1980, Happy House finds Siouxsie poking macabre fun at the mirage of happiness of the family unit in a consumer society. “We’ve come to scream in the happy house/We’re in a dream in the happy house/We’re all quite sane”. By the time the group took it on to Top of the Pops, Kohl-eyelinered Siouxsie clones were a feature of many British high streets. As she transformed the role of a female frontwoman into something powerful, mysterious and dominant, teenage fans were painting their bedroom walls black, and acquiring the singer’s deeply-held interest in the supernatural. Yup, the Banshees had invented goth.

Their third single of 1980 provided something of an unexpected commercial crash landing, when the band were perhaps left to ponder that a haunting song full of weird religious symbolism wouldn’t necessarily mean a Christmas hit. Nevertheless, although this between-albums single peaked at No 41 it remains one of the band’s finest moments. From the infectiously menacing bass and drums intro to Siouxsie’s beautifully disturbed delivery, the Banshees’ oblique take on the Middle East and religion finds the band entering their imperial period. Sioux and Severin’s love of horror films is perhaps brought to bear in the song’s eerie second half, which features the sort of ghostly choral chanting reminiscent of films such as The Omen. A toweringly brilliant single, but perhaps not one to play alone in the dark.

There’s plenty of darkness on 1981’s Juju. In fact, their fourth album is arguably the most horror-filled of the lot, with songs about voodoo dolls, prostitution, psychological terror and even – on Halloween – a murder. In fact, it could almost be a gothic pastiche if it wasn’t so brilliantly done, the lyrics so authentically creepy that you could almost be forgiven for thinking that Siouxsie grew up in the bowels of hell, rather than the Kent suburbs. The album’s masterstroke, though, is in allaying such gloomy, suspense-filled material with the best melodies of their career, and music with so much adventure it seems to fire off in a new direction from one minute to the next. Spellbound – the single that opens the album – is typical, cascading from jangling, psychedelic guitars to galloping tribal drumming, via a headrush of sound, voice, danger and exhilaration.

Track five on Juju spins off into another of those intoxicating new directions. So far, the Banshees have fired through punk, post-punk and goth, but Monitor finds Siouxsie casting her dark eyes enviously and brilliantly towards the dancefloor. From John McGeogh’s invitingly distorted guitar riff to Budgie’s lithe, funky drumming, this five-and-a-half minute alt-stomper is one of a handful of Banshees tracks from the period that took the nation’s goths from sipping Pernod moodily in dark corners to shaking it about in the local disco. By now resembling a modern-day Cleopatra, Siouxsie is at her most dominant and imperious, hurtling through prophetic, Ballardian imagery of CCTV and societal control to reality television, although the invitation to “sit back and enjoy the real McCoy” could equally have applied to the band’s growing legion of imitators.

8 Night Shift

Following Monitor on the album after only a second’s pause, Night Shift is the third track from Juju here, but exerts such a powerful grip it is impossible to ignore. From the eerie, vulnerable intro (“I see you in darkness, I feel you ...”) to the fracturing guitar, to the drums, which sound like they were recorded in a tomb, this is arguably the band’s most successful exercise in creeping tension, which finds intoxicating release in raw power and a brilliant hook line. It wasn’t immediately known at the time that the song was based on the crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, and it presents a chillingly realistic portrait of a killer at large.

After the enveloping darkness of Juju, fifth album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse unexpectedly throws open the curtains to let in the light. This final track (and 1982 single), which later gave shoegazers Slowdive their name, sounds like the lid being slowly released on a pressure cooker, as the band emerge from the black and flit from suspense to sensuality. They change course again musically, too, switching from brooding rock to psychedelic pop, and here a violin/percussion dance groove so hypnotic it made perfect sense for LCD Soundsystem to cover it years later.

By their later albums, the Banshees faced the same problem as many a seminal band after a long time together: formerly unexplored territory has become familiar, relationships are fracturing, and the bar has been set so high it proves harder and harder to clear it. Equally, there was the cataclysmic blow of losing the creative powerhouse McGeoch to a breakdown, after A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. They were still capable of great, pioneering moments, though, such as this terrific 1988 single. Like a lot of pop’s more adventurous moments, Peek-a-Boo actually came out by glorious mistake, as producer Mike Hedges accidentally played a track backwards and Siouxsie wrote a song around the resulting loop of sound. The brass stabs and fast edits won fans in indie and rap alike, while critics were enraptured but bewildered. Melody Maker praised its “1930s hip-hop”, and over a decade later, Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke said it sounded like “the most current, futuristic bit of guitar pop music I’ve ever heard”. Whatever genre Peek-a-Boo inhabits, it’s a long way from a takeaway in Chislehurst.

Siouxsie and the Banshees’ remastered and expanded albums – Through the Looking Glass, Peepshow, Superstition and The Rapture – are out now